In a conventional power conversion apparatus, high efficiency and an increase in the size of a cooler have been sought in order to secure reliability against thermal destruction caused by losses of a transistor and a free wheeling diode. Meanwhile, SiC (silicon carbide) has been attracting attentions, which has a lower loss and higher efficiency than Si (silicon), so that there has been an expectation of an application of SiC to power conversion apparatuses with high efficiency and reliability.
For example, in Patent Literature 1 mentioned below, a SiC-JFET is employed as a transistor included in a power conversion apparatus (an inverter) and a SiC-SBD (a Schottky-barrier diode) is employed as a free wheeling diode connected to the SiC-JFET in inverse parallel.